Deprecated (16384): The ArrayAccess methods will be removed in 4.0.0.Use getParam(), getData() and getQuery() instead. - /home/brlfuser/public_html/src/Controller/ArtileDetailController.php, line: 73
 You can disable deprecation warnings by setting `Error.errorLevel` to `E_ALL & ~E_USER_DEPRECATED` in your config/app.php. [CORE/src/Core/functions.php, line 311]
Deprecated (16384): The ArrayAccess methods will be removed in 4.0.0.Use getParam(), getData() and getQuery() instead. - /home/brlfuser/public_html/src/Controller/ArtileDetailController.php, line: 74
 You can disable deprecation warnings by setting `Error.errorLevel` to `E_ALL & ~E_USER_DEPRECATED` in your config/app.php. [CORE/src/Core/functions.php, line 311]
Warning (512): Unable to emit headers. Headers sent in file=/home/brlfuser/public_html/vendor/cakephp/cakephp/src/Error/Debugger.php line=853 [CORE/src/Http/ResponseEmitter.php, line 48]
Warning (2): Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/brlfuser/public_html/vendor/cakephp/cakephp/src/Error/Debugger.php:853) [CORE/src/Http/ResponseEmitter.php, line 148]
Warning (2): Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/brlfuser/public_html/vendor/cakephp/cakephp/src/Error/Debugger.php:853) [CORE/src/Http/ResponseEmitter.php, line 181]
Notice (8): Undefined variable: urlPrefix [APP/Template/Layout/printlayout.ctp, line 8]latest-news-updates/a-claim-for-dignity-pratap-bhanu-mehta-4684143.html"/> LATEST NEWS UPDATES | A claim for dignity -Pratap Bhanu Mehta | Im4change.org
Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

A claim for dignity -Pratap Bhanu Mehta
-The Indian Express

It is morally obtuse and analytically misleading to see farmers’ long march as a demand for handouts

The “long march of the farmers” in Maharashtra refocused attention on the crisis in certain regions in Indian agriculture. It should be the headline news that jolts the nation out of a complacent stupor. The protest made a series of long-standing but familiar demands: Loan waivers, increase in MSP, implementation of Forest Rights Act and wider diffusion of effective property rights, improvements in irrigation. Experts can debate the different measures needed to address these demands. But the moral significance of a moment like this is not just about the technicalities, or political partisanship. It is about the terms of the social contract.

From that point of view, the farmers’ rally was a deeply poignant and dignified reminder of important political truths. First, there is a structural invisibility of farmers that transcends political parties. It is not just a function of urban bias or the capacity of media and many other modes of representation to render our society invisible to us. It is also a function of the larger political economy, where agriculture interests are not represented effectively in political parties. And even those that are, pertain largely to defending large farmers, rather than small and marginal ones. The dignity of this protest comes from the fact that it was not just, as is sometimes the case with protest movements, relatively more privileged agrarian castes and groups asserting their power. This protest was indeed speaking the grammar of the most marginalised, many with barely an acre of land or none at all, and often hard to organise. This was not farmers as a mere pressure group wanting more; this was farmers who are being pushed even more to the margins, trying to hold on to a modicum of existence. It deserves moral attention beyond the calculus of bargaining.

It would be a mistake to think of addressing these demands of farmers merely as a form of populist gestures. The way the middle class should see this movement is not in the usual framing of palliatives and handouts. Instead, it is rather an important form of state making that perhaps more honestly articulates what so many middle-class movements profess to want, but deny others. The dispute over which cost method should be used (A2, A2 plus FL or C2) to calculate MSP support, is not about more handouts. Its underlying premise is the one that economists who are wary of populism should applaud: It wants a true reckoning of costs, rather than a misleading representation of the costs of production. Its aim is to invert the one construction of their identity that farmers are made to labour under: That they are a group that perpetually needs subsidy. But the reverse is true: By not looking at the full costs we render invisible the ways in which farmers subsidise us.

Similarly with loan waivers. In a well-functioning system, loan waivers would not be necessary, and they can be, under some circumstances, counter-productive. But it would be foolish not to recognise that in the political economy of loan waivers is also embedded a question of distributive justice and real costs. It is difficult to imagine how anyone can look the farmers in the eye and call loan waivers to them populist, in a context where banks and crony capital have been receiving unprecedented write-offs. The language of moral hazard, as applied to farmers, seems, in this context, not so much a piece of sound economic analysis, as much as a way of telling farmers that their claims don’t count for as much as those in power who can hold entire financial systems to ransom. The moral hazard lies in not taking these distributive claims seriously.

Please click here to read more.